The last verse of the chapter, and the hinge on which the whole Antioch speech (vv. 14-21) swings shut. Paul has just said that he died to law in order to live to God, that he has been co-crucified with Christ, and that the life he now lives in flesh he lives in the faith of the Son of God who loved him and gave himself up for him (vv. 19-20). Verse 21 states the negative counterpart and then supplies the ground for it with γάρ.

Three things carry the verse.

First, ἀθετῶ is not a word about attitude. It belongs to the documentary register — annulling a will, repudiating a treaty, voiding an instrument that stands in force. Paul is denying that he has cancelled something legally valid, which means he is answering a charge, not volunteering a disclaimer.

Second, the conditional is a reductio. εἰ … ἄρα entertains a premise for the sake of argument and lands it on an intolerable consequence; the first-class form says nothing about whether Paul holds the premise. He plainly does not — the apodosis is designed to be unbearable.

Third, δωρεάν is the sentence’s sting. It is the adverbial accusative of δωρεά, from the same stem as χάρις in the first half: the word for a thing given freely. Applied to Christ’s death it inverts into ‘for nothing, to no purpose, gratuitously’ — the one gift that would have been given needlessly. Paul has set the grace of God at one end of the verse and the gratuitousness of Christ’s death at the other, and the reader is meant to hear that it is the same root both times.

Note also the anarthrous νόμου. Paul does not write ‘the law’ here, and the categorical force matters: the claim is about any law-regime as a route to righteousness, not merely about the Mosaic document.

The verb is built on ἀ- + τίθημι (via ἄθετος, ‘not placed, invalid’), and its home is the language of instruments and undertakings. In the LXX it renders the Hebrew vocabulary of covenant-breaking and rebellion: Israel ἠθέτησεν against YHWH (Isa 1:2; 4 Kgdms 18:7, 20 of revolt against a suzerain), and it is used of setting aside a διαθήκη. In the Hellenistic papyri it is the standard verb for annulling a contract, a will, or a decree.

The NT distribution holds the register. Mark 7:9: ἀθετεῖτε τὴν ἐντολὴν τοῦ θεοῦ — you void the command. Gal 3:15: a ratified διαθήκη οὐδεὶς ἀθετεῖ, nobody annuls it. 1 Tim 5:12: τὴν πρώτην πίστιν ἠθέτησαν, they voided their first pledge. Heb 10:28: ἀθετήσας νόμον Μωϋσέως. Luke 7:30: the lawyers τὴν βουλὴν τοῦ θεοῦ ἠθέτησαν.

So ‘nullify’ or ‘set aside’ is right and ‘frustrate’ (so the older English, after the Vulgate’s non abicio / irritam facio tradition) belongs in liturgical register, where English readers still hear it. Excluded from reading tiers: ‘reject’ (drifts to attitude and duplicates ἀρνέομαι), ‘ignore’ and ‘disregard’ (far too light for a verb of legal annulment), ‘treat as worthless’ (imports a valuation the verb does not make), ‘nullify the grace of God’ is acceptable because English ‘nullify’ retains the instrument-sense.

The present tense is durative and, given the first-person singular standing against the surrounding plural, is best heard as answering a standing charge: this is not what I am doing.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx · bdf

Proposed — pending reviewRichard N. Longenecker, Galatians, Word Biblical Commentary 41 (Dallas: Word, 1990)

Per the corpus entry, χάρις is rendered ‘grace’ throughout: it spans Hellenistic benefaction-favor and LXX חֵן/חֶסֶד, and by metonymy the gift itself. ‘Favor’ is transactional, ‘kindness’ drops the gift.

The genitive τοῦ θεοῦ is source and possession at once and stays a bare ‘of’ phrase. Do not render ‘God’s gracious gift’ or ‘God’s kindness toward us’ — the first collapses the genitive into a possessive adjective, the second substitutes a different noun.

What is contested is the referent. Three readings are live and none is excluded by the lexeme:

• The gospel of free justification as a state of affairs that Paul is accused of overturning (favored by the forensic register of ἀθετέω and by the answering clause about Christ’s death);
• The grace given to Paul in his commission, picking up τὴν χάριν τὴν δοθεῖσάν μοι at Gal 2:9 — in which case he is saying that his conduct at Antioch did not void the very grace the pillars acknowledged;
• Grace as the operative principle of the whole order established by Christ’s death, the sense ἐκπίπτω τῆς χάριτος carries at Gal 5:4.

The apparatus records all three. The rendering adjudicates none, because the bare noun plus bare genitive does not.

Built onbdag · bdb

Proposed — pending reviewJames D. G. Dunn, The Epistle to the Galatians, Black's New Testament Commentary (London: A&C Black, 1993)

The conditional is first class (εἰ + indicative, with the copula elided in the protasis). The corpus policy on first-class conditions is that the protasis is entertained as real for the sake of argument and that ‘since’ overcommits. Here the point is sharper: the first-class form is a formal matter of grammar and carries no claim at all about whether the speaker believes the premise. Paul manifestly does not — the apodosis exists to make it unbearable.

γάρ grounds the denial of the first clause and must be rendered (§10).

ἄρα is the weaker, more colloquial inferential, drawing out what would follow on a granted supposition. The corpus entry (fixed at Gal 5:11) requires that the English keep the clause audibly hypothetical — ‘then, in that case’ rather than a bare ‘therefore’, which would read as the author’s own assertion. The identical construction stands at Gal 5:11 (ἄρα κατήργηται τὸ σκάνδαλον τοῦ σταυροῦ) and 1 Cor 15:14, and all three are reductiones.

The protasis is verbless: διὰ νόμου δικαιοσύνη. Per the standing verbless-clause policy the copula is supplied and bracketed in the literal tier. Note that the supplied verb’s tense is an interpretive act — ‘if righteousness is through law’ and ‘if righteousness comes through law’ are not identical, and the second slightly favors a process-reading. The bracketing records the supplement.

The accentual distinction between inferential ἄρα and interrogative ἆρα is editorial in the earliest majuscules, which are unaccented. A question here (‘did Christ then die for nothing?’) is grammatically available and must be reported as a live possibility that the printed accent, not the manuscripts, forecloses.

Built onbdf · na28 · bdag

Proposed — pending reviewHans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979)

νόμου is anarthrous. Per the standing policy (ἐκ νόμου, ὑπὸ νόμον, ἐν νόμῳ, οὐκ ἔστιν νόμος) the article is not supplied even where English reads stiffly: the absence is qualitative, presenting law as a regime or principle rather than as the named Mosaic document. Supplying ‘the law’ narrows a categorical claim — that no law-regime whatsoever yields righteousness — into a statement about one body of legislation, which is precisely the narrowing the anarthrous form resists. The Latin tradition’s per legem could not mark the distinction and the English tradition followed it.

διά + gen is intermediate agency and must stay distinct from ἐκ (source), ἐν (sphere), and ὑπό (personal agency). Galatians exploits the distinction throughout: ἐξ ἔργων νόμου (2:16, three times), ἐν νόμῳ (5:4), ἐκ πίστεως (2:16; 3:11), ἐκ θεοῦ (Phil 3:9). That Paul writes διά here and ἐκ at 2:16 is data. ‘By the law’ blurs agency into instrumentality and erases a distinction the letter maintains.

δικαιοσύνη retains the single corpus gloss ‘righteousness’, anarthrous and qualitative. Do not supply ‘a righteousness’ with an indefinite article weighting it toward Phil 3:9’s ἐμὴν δικαιοσύνην, and do not render ‘justification’, which substitutes the verbal noun for the state-noun and pre-decides the forensic/ethical question (§4, §9).

Built onbdag · bdf · silva-becnt

Adverbial accusative of δωρεά (‘gift’), and so cognate with δῶρον, δωρέομαι, and — at one remove through the δο-/χαρ- benefaction field — standing in deliberate relation to χάρις at the head of the verse.

The word has three attested first-century values, and they pull in opposite directions:

1. As a free gift, without payment. LXX Gen 29:15; Exod 21:2, 11; 2 Kgdms 24:24 (οὐ μὴ ἀνενέγκω … δωρεάν, David refusing to offer what cost him nothing). NT: Matt 10:8 (δωρεὰν ἐλάβετε, δωρεὰν δότε); Rom 3:24 (δικαιούμενοι δωρεὰν τῇ αὐτοῦ χάριτι); 2 Cor 11:7; 2 Thess 3:8; Rev 21:6; 22:17.
2. Without cause, undeservedly. LXX Ps 34:7, 19; 68:5 (ἐμίσησάν με δωρεάν, quoted at John 15:25); 1 Kgdms 19:5.
3. To no purpose, in vain. Job 1:9 LXX; Sir 20:23; and Gal 2:21.

The third is the sense here, and it is not a different word but the first sense inverted: a gift given for nothing received is a gift given for nothing. That is exactly the irony Paul wants. ‘In vain’ is the traditional English and is accurate, but it collides in this corpus with εἰς κενόν (‘into emptiness’, already fixed), which Paul himself uses two chapters earlier at Gal 2:2 and again at 4:11 (εἰκῇ). The three expressions must stay distinguishable: εἰς κενόν is a spatial idiom of fruitless effort, εἰκῇ is purposelessness, δωρεάν is gratuitousness.

Policy: ‘for nothing’ in reading tiers, which holds both the gift-sense and the futility-sense as English does; ‘gratuitously’ in the study tier where the δωρεά root must be audible; ‘in vain’ confined to declared liturgical register. Excluded: ‘needlessly’ and ‘pointlessly’ (name only the futility and sever the gift), ‘for no reason’ (adopts sense 2), ‘uselessly’ (register drift).

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

Complexive aorist: the death viewed as a single completed whole. English simple past.

The lexical point is the echo. Paul has written ἀπέθανον of himself two verses earlier (ἐγὼ γὰρ διὰ νόμου νόμῳ ἀπέθανον, v. 19) and now writes ἀπέθανεν of Christ, with διὰ νόμου standing in both verses. The argument of vv. 19-21 is held together by the repetition, and one English root is mandatory at both points. ‘Christ’s death was pointless’ nominalizes the verb and dissolves the link.

The subject is Χριστός, anarthrous and titular-become-name; retain as written per the Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ word-order policy. No witness varies the name here.

Note also the restraint: Paul names the death and supplies no mechanism. He has ὑπὲρ ἐμοῦ and παραδόντος ἑαυτόν in v. 20, ἐξηγόρασεν at 3:13, γενόμενος κατάρα at 3:13 — and none of that is imported here. The bare verb stands.

Built onbdag · bdf

Greek manuscripts have no quotation marks, so the point at which Paul’s words to Cephas (begun at v. 14, εἶπον τῷ Κηφᾷ ἔμπροσθεν πάντων) give way to his address to the Galatians is set entirely by modern editorial judgment.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

Proposed — pending reviewF. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982)

The verse is textually stable; NA28 prints it without an apparatus entry of consequence and UBS5 assigns it no rated variation unit.

Minor matters worth recording:

• Some later witnesses read ἡ δικαιοσύνη with the article. This is the expected direction of smoothing — scribes supply articles with abstract nouns — and the anarthrous reading is both better attested and the harder one. The article would narrow a qualitative claim.
• The accent on ἄρα is editorial. The earliest majuscules are unaccented, and the interrogative ἆρα is grammatically available (see the syntax section). This is a decision of the printed editions, reported as such and not as manuscript evidence.
• Punctuation throughout — the colon after θεοῦ, the comma after δικαιοσύνη, and the closing of the quotation begun at v. 14 — is likewise editorial.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

The Fathers read the verse as a reductio, and the force of δωρεάν was not in doubt among them.

Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal.) takes the conditional as an argument from consequence: if righteousness were available through law, the cross would have been superfluous, and the man who says so convicts himself of making Christ’s death pointless. He presses the rhetorical turn — Paul does not argue that law fails and therefore Christ was needed, but assumes Christ was needed and infers that law fails.

Jerome (Comm. in Gal.) renders gratis Christus mortuus est and comments on the gratuitousness directly: a death given for nothing received. His Latin preserves the gift-sense of δωρεάν better than the English tradition’s ‘in vain’, which came in through a different Latin line.

Augustine (Exp. Gal.) makes the verse a pivot in the grace question: to assert righteousness through law is precisely gratiam Dei irritam facere, and he reads ἀθετῶ in the annulment-sense — voiding what stands.

Theodoret notes the first-person singular against the preceding plural and takes Paul to be fending off an accusation rather than making a volunteered profession, which is a good observation on the force of the present tense.

What none of them does is read the verse as a general statement about religion and legalism. For all four, the argument runs from the cross backward.

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Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1889) · Jerome, Commentarii in epistulam Pauli apostoli ad Galatas, ed. G. Raspanti, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 77A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006) · Augustine, Expositio epistulae ad Galatas, ed. and trans. Eric Plumer, Augustine's Commentary on Galatians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

The verse does three structural jobs at once.

It closes the Antioch material by restating in the negative what v. 16 stated positively, and it does so with the same two prepositional phrases that chapter 2 has been building on: διὰ νόμου against ἐκ πίστεως (2:16), δικαιοσύνη against δικαιόω (2:16, 17).

It supplies the premise for chapter 3, which opens by asking the Galatians to reason from their own experience (3:1-5) and then runs the same reductio in other terms: εἰ γὰρ ἐκ νόμου ἡ κληρονομία, οὐκέτι ἐξ ἐπαγγελίας (3:18).

And it establishes that for Paul the cross is the fixed point from which everything else is measured, not a conclusion reached from a prior assessment of the law’s inadequacy. The logic is: Christ died; therefore righteousness is not through law. Not: law failed; therefore Christ died. Chrysostom saw this and it governs how the whole letter reads.

The pairing with Gal 5:4 is worth holding together: there, those seeking justification ἐν νόμῳ have fallen out of τῆς χάριτος. Here, Paul denies that he has set that grace aside. Same noun, opposite accusation, and the two verses frame the letter’s central section.

Built onsilva-becnt · bauckham-god-crucified

Proposed — pending reviewJ. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997)